Diabetes Update 121: Low-Carb Best for Losing Weight

August 1, 2008

By David Mendosa

So far I have written 299 articles for Health Central about all aspects of diabetes. In July this great website published nine more of my new diabetes articles:

Low-Carb Best for Weight Loss. The country's leading medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, just published the first long-term comparison of the top three weight loss diets. They compared low-carb with low-fat and the Mediterranean diet. Best for both weight loss and cholesterol was the low-carb diet.

Cheating. Cheating is dishonest. It's a word best reserved to its usual sense of copying the work of others. Using this word to describe any exceptions from our diets is counterproductive.

Viva Aviva! We have been able to get this Accu-Chek blood glucose meter for a couple of years. But now there's more good news about it.

Looking AHEAD to Weight Loss. The Look AHEAD trial of weight loss strategies began in 2001 and is scheduled to conclude in 2012. But the researchers already know three simple ways that really work: weighing at least once a week, not skipping breakfast, and cutting back on how much we eat out at fast-food restaurants.

Food Diaries Help. Writing down what we eat can double your weight loss, according to a study that the American Journal of Preventative Medicine is publishing this month. People have been recommending this tip for years. Now we have proof that it works.

The Trouble with Buffets. The trouble with buffets is that they encourage you to try to eat it all. I learned that lesson the hard way. But Victor J. Stevens, Ph.D., a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research in Portland, Oregon, taught me how to handle them. If you ever go to an all-you-can eat restaurant, you need to read these tips.

Physical Activity Guidelines. We are finally going to have physical activity guidelines to parallel the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The chairman of the committee that researched and wrote the new guidelines, Stanford Professor William Haskell, offers a sneak preview of the recommendations. He explains what the concept "MET-minutes" means and how many of these minutes we need to exercise each week.

How to Eat Your Heart Out. My friend told me that he wasn't able to lose his belly fat because he was living with someone. That reminded me of how relationships have sometimes pulled me down too. Like when I stopped watching my diet as closely as I had before. And I exercised a lot less. And I gained a lot of weight. Now I cook almost all of my meals myself, which is probably the solution to this problem.

Mouth Control. How would you like to reduce your A1C level by 0.67 percent -- like from 6.67 to 6.0 -- without putting less in your mouth or even increasing your exercise? This third type of A1C control may be the easiest ever.

Truvia Update
What looks like the best sweetener ever just became available. It seems to have everything going for it.

Truvia is a natural product. It has no calories. It's the only non-caloric sweetener using a bulking agent, the sugar alcohol erythritol, that has essentially no calories. Even Truvia's name, standing for true and way, is great marketing.

The company that developed Truvia is Cargill. When I mentioned that to a friend of mine, he had never heard of the company. But Cargill is the biggest privately owned company in the world.

This means that Cargill has the marketing muscle to make Truvia available everywhere. I was surprised, in fact, that we can already buy it.

Truvia went on sale first at D'Agostino supermarkets in Manhattan and online at www.truvia.com. The price is $3.99 plus shipping and handling for 40 single-serve sachets. That's a little more expensive than older, artificial sweeteners, such as saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose.

Cargill expects to have Truvia available at grocery stores and big box retailers across the country in the fall. Truvia also will be a sweetener in beverages and foods -- such as yogurts, cereals, and snack bars -- as early as next year. Coca-Cola co-developed Truvia with Cargill and has exclusive rights to use it in beverages.

A couple of weeks ago the company's public relations firm sent me sample packets of Truvia and a chocolate bar made from it. They are great with no bitter after-taste link stevia sometimes has.

The reason why I compare it to stevia is that Truvia is the brand name of the extract rebiana from the stevia plant. And stevia has another problem.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lets companies sell stevia as a supplement. But not as a food. "It cannot be sold as a sweetener because FDA considers it an unapproved food additive," the agency says.

The FDA has no formal approval process for natural substances, Cargill spokeswoman Ann Tucker told me when I called her. But an "independent panel of experts met, reviewed the science, and made the statement that the product is safe."

Personally, I still don't use any sweeteners, caloric or non-caloric, as I wrote last year. I recognize that my position is an extreme one, and if you use any sweetener I can't imagine a better choice than Truvia.

Dr. Bernstein's WebcastIf you have any interest in controlling your diabetes by low-carb eating, one of the best resources is Dr. Richard K. Bernstein's monthly webcast. It's an hour of excellent diabetes education.

Dr. Bernstein's next live Tele-Seminar is Wednesday,
August 27, at 8:00 PM EST, 7:00 PM CST, 6:00 PM MST, and 5:00 PM PST. You can click here to register: http://www.diabetes911.net/askdrb/index.php. It's also available as a live webcast both on the Internet and by phone.

Announcements

Health Central
The Health Central Network continues to get better and better. It will now notify you by email of new articles (SharePosts) by me or anyone who posts at HealthCentral.com. Just click on “Subscribe” on my "Profile" page. The new software also now permits threaded replies to comments. So you will see more replies from me than I have posted since the major site revamp on March 1.

This Newsletter Diabetes Update keeps you up-to-date with new articles, Web pages, and books that I have written about diabetes.

I list and link most of these on my at Diabetes Directory and in the site’s menu at the upper left of all my Web pages.

From time to time Diabetes Update may also include links to other Web pages of special interest.

HTML Format
I send out Diabetes Update email in HTML format, which all Web browsers and most modern email programs can display. HTML has live links to all the sites named in the text so that with a simple click of a mouse you can connect to the site you have just been reading about.

My Guarantee
This newsletter:

Is and will remain free.

Will never include advertising (except targeted Google ads at the bottom of the web page and not in the email newsletter).

Nor will I ever sell, rent, or trade your email address to anyone.

I will link sources of information.

I will disclose any conflict of interest.

If and when I learn of any errors of fact, I will correct them.

Archives: I now send out Diabetes Update once a month. Previous issues are online: